Shattered Glass

The movie Shattered Glass highlights big mistakes that journalists and other members of a paper can make. By making these mistakes, they are seriously hurting the journalism profession. Readers depend on journalists to provide them with correct information and when that trust is broken, there is a problem. I have picked out three lessons that I have learned from this movie.

For example, the fabrication of facts, such as people and places, is the worst thing that you can do. According to Merriam- Webster, the job of a fact checker is to “to verify the factual accuracy of.” As a journalist, you are expected to write a story that is factual in every way for people to read. If a journalist fails to do this, they are misinforming the public and failing in the profession.

Another example has to do with the fact checkers. No matter how personable or reliable someone seems to be, that does not mean that they will print stories that are factual. They should keep their personal lives separate from their professional lives because if they don’t, they will miss facts and be a huge reason why the false story was published. They must focus on their job at hand and disregard any personal feelings towards someone.

The last lesson I learned was that it is not enough to just apologize for your actions. You must take responsibility for them as well. As a journalist, you are supposed to rely correct information to the public. It is not enough to apologize when you have delivered wrong information to a lot of people.

Fabrication and plagiarism can cause major repercussions to journalism as a whole. According to Dictionary.com, plagiarism is the act of taking ideas someone else’s work without their permission.By having journalists fabricate false stories, they are putting the company at a huge risk. They are risking peoples’ jobs and even the existence of the company all together. If the public reads a story and assumes that it is correct, they will be very angry if they find out that in fact, it is false. This will make them very skeptical of all future stories that they will read and make journalism look like a joke. As said by Steve Butry,”Scandals in newsrooms large and small have forced news organizations to apply the same skepticism to some staff members that they do to the institutions they cover.” They will not take journalism seriously anymore and for that, the profession will suffer.